GENDER AND DISNEY
Description
We are going to discuss how Disney portrayed gender issues in its early and current films. The impression of Disney is always about princess and prince, but Disney is trying to express deeper meanings than just love stories between princess and prince. In the podcast, we will talk about the changes of female princesses on their behaviors and values, as well as the male characters.
Pre-Production: Preparation and Planning
Annotation from the sample podcast
Outline of the script
This was my first experience with podcast, and it took me some time to understand what podcast is and what we need to do for the podcast. Before the podcast, we have a meeting to decide each group member’s job, as well as the topic. This process of making decisions was relatively smooth, we began to do researches after we deciding to talk about Cinderella, Tangled, and The Princess and the Frog. I think this was a good chance to improve our communication skills by working with group members.
Note from our first group meeting
Production—Creating the Podcast and Microsite
After the research, we wrote the outline and made a connection between the sources and our podcast. I was podcast director, and also did a research to find some related images and the ending music for the microsite. We started recording while we were practicing, we thought it might be perfect for our practice session. After our first recording, we thought segment two was more like reading rather than conversation, thus, we decided to re record it. This was a good way for us to improve the speaking skills, since we were talking and speaking a lot in the podcast.
Looking Ahead in Three Paragraphs
Since this is my first time to do podcast, it is a kind of challenge for me. English is not my first language, and we will be conversing in English throughout the podcast with our group members. Therefore, I made some mistakes, I forgot how to read some words when speaking and my speaking was not that fluency. It is a kind of embarrassed since it caused the podcast editor an extra work to do. Besides, it is also hard for me to talk as a normal conversation when reading the script, it is the biggest challenges for me when recording.
For the skills I learned from the collaborating, communicating plays a vital part in working with others. For instance, we exchanged our Instagram and emails to discuss the project and determine the meeting time. Besides, being confident is also an essential skill. Do not be shy to express your opinions to your group mates, otherwise, it will be hard to work together since you have different ideas with your group members or don’t agree with them. I think these are also important in career, a team without communication will not be success, and also do not afraid of being denied your opinion.
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When communicating the ideas with group members, it will let us understand and analyze one thing from different aspects. Since we are sharing our ideas, it will also let us know the ideas which we didn’t think about before. In addition, discussing ideas is going to help us develop our essay work. Like we talked about Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Tiana in the podcast, I think I will still discuss these princesses and compare their behaviors in the essay. Comparing the early and recent films is a good way to explore how Disney changes of presenting gender issues.